What is DocumentCloud?
DocumentCloud is a web-based document management and analysis platform designed for use by journalists, news organizations, and researchers. It allows users to securely upload, host, annotate, organize, publish, and analyze primary source documents related to news stories or research projects.
Some key features of DocumentCloud include:
- Ability to securely upload and host PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, images, audio files, video files, and other file formats
- Customizable document viewers with annotation tools for highlighting, commenting, and tagging documents
- Automated text extraction and optical character recognition (OCR) to make non-searchable files text-searchable
- Tools for organizing documents into projects with customized metadata
- Embeds and widgets to allow easy integration of DocumentCloud projects into websites, blogs, and news articles
- Collaboration tools to allow groups to work together on analyzing documents
- Powerful search and filtering capabilities across an entire document set
- Analytics to track public interaction with documents and projects
By centralizing hard-to-find source documents in an easy-to-use platform, DocumentCloud aims to promote transparency, enhance investigative journalism, enable public access and understanding of primary sources, and allow more effective analysis of those sources.